Insights on the Seasonality of Moving

Here's a link to my latest working paper: "Insights on the Seasonality of Moving."

The "Insights" in the title refers to Google Insights for Search, a really cool tool that lets you access normalized weekly search volume data from 2004 to the present.

Abstract: Census surveys have documented the seasonality of geographic mobility in the United States. Google Insights for Search is a tool that provides access to search volume data in weekly time series format from 2004 to the present. Google search data for moving-related terms is analyzed with regressions and a Hodrick-Prescott Filter and is found to display seasonality very similar to Census results. The alignment of search results and survey results is a useful finding since search data has the advantages of weekly granularity and nearly real-time updates.